Music Industry Rearranging Deck Chairs

You may have heard that Steve Jobs wrote this article on how the music industry should rid itself of digital rights management (DRM) systems in favor of open formats such as MP3.

Of course, today the RIAA fired back, saying: "Screw you guys! I'm going home!" OK, they didn't say that, but they did thank Jobs for offering to license Apple's FairPlay DRM (which he did not, though he said he would consider it). In an article in WaPo (that's The Washington Post for you non-geeks), Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media said: "There's a number of ways to negotiate this transition," he said. "You don't have to flip the switch all at once." Well, here at BitWorks we have flipped our switch. In fact, we were "born" without a switch at all. To me, DRM is nothing but a colossal pain in the ass.

The industry is flailing and trying to keep itself afloat, lamely trying to convince us that CDs really should cost much more than they do, as they continue to sue music downloaders. It's starting to sound like a low budget horror movie.

Web notes: you may notice a few changes to the site if you have been paying attention. You DO surf here daily don't you? I fixed the blog feed date, but now it looks like I will have more fun debugging the posts being out of order.